Agreed. The other thing is, with 8 cores maximum, Intel can only compete in the ryzen 5-7 range. Besides, even if they price their new i7 and i9 competitively relative to the ryzen 7 5800X, you still have to pay the Intel motherboard premium. They have to price the new CPUs at least $100 below the 5800X to make total system costs match, which absolutely won't happen.
I didn't mention ryzen 9 on purpose. With 12 and 16 cores, they're a totally different class. Intel proved with the i9-10900K that they can't compete in this class on 14 nm. I just wish to see more innovation at least on the core i7 range, and reasonable prices from both companies in the future.
All things considered, AMD has no reason to drop prices at the moment.
Well, if steam survey is representative (and it's probably
over representative, by a wide margin) then > 8 cores amounts to under 1.5% of the market. Since there are boatloads of corporate PCs with zero exposure on Steam, not to mention tons of cheap PCs sold to non gamers and non enthusiasts, that's probably a way high number.
In other words, even within the enthusiast / gaming segment there aren't that many people using > 8 cores, and those 10+ core segments are not growing much. 6 and 8 core are the ones that are growing.
If they wanted to compete in core count for this segment of DIY/enthusiast/gamers they need do nothing more than drop the iGPU, something AMD doesn't have and which takes up 1/3 of the die on a 10700K and about 1/4 on a 10900K.
The fact they aren't doing that and are actually going the other way (bigger / faster iGPU) illustrates where their priority is - the big OEMs. That is Intel's real primary customer, and those 4650 Zen 2 APUs haven't really made a dent in that.
Intel has had 10, 12, 14, 16, and 18 core 14nm X-Series since gen 7 for those that really want big core counts. Those are labelled as their enthusiast chips to start with, and they don't have iGPU. It will be interesting if rocket lake makes it into those.